CRITIC PICKS QUEBEC FILMS
Ignored by TIFF, worth a view
Let’s get rid of the obvious: I very much admire the film Juste la fin du monde, and in my heart I am still an adherent of the auteur school of cinema where the director’s identity determines the “nationality” of a film. But it’s hard to think of Xavier Dolan’s film, released last year, as Québécois, let alone Canadian.
It feels like a French film made in Quebec, and everyone involved should be very proud of it. Not that such sentiment entered into the French film awards, Les Césars, where it got six nominations, including best foreign film.
With that in mind, I would like to celebrate what I consider the best two Québécois films of the past year, Embrasse moi comme tu m’aimes (Kiss Me Like a Lover) from veteran director André Forcier and Avant les rues (Before the Streets), a first film by Chloé Leriche. All three films are in the running for the Quebec critics’ prize for best Québécois feature film of 2016.
The Forcier and Leriche films are good news all around for Quebec cinema: a first film and a work from a veteran; one directed by a male and one by a female.
Sadly, neither worked at the box office, and bizarrely — unlike Juste la fin du monde — neither made the Toronto Film Festival’s Top 10 Canadian Films of the Year list or were invited to that festival.
Before the Streets, shot in Atikamekw, with some English and French, made its debut at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival. No mean feat for a small-budget film shot on the Manawan reserve in Quebec using real-life brotherand-sister musicians Rykko Bellemare and Kwena Bellemare Boivin in their feature film debut.
Though Leriche is not indigenous, she succeeds in creating a portrait of family life in a place where family life isn’t easy, but nonetheless remains the place of last resort, of comfort and healing.
The final scene, when these two totally believable actors are lying in bed singing to soothe themselves, is astonishingly moving. The film shows no inclination toward sentimentality and even less toward sociology, the imperious element that always seems to threaten films made in such settings.
Instead, we are offered a glimpse of a world so close and yet so unfamiliar, one we don’t really want to know too much about.
On the other hand, Before the Streets is entirely familiar: young guy, no work, tough stepdad, soft mom, wants to hang, get high — the usual. Leriche takes this material and does something brave. Her esthetic courage alone makes this a film worth seeing.
Last fall, Leriche was rightfully acknowledged, winning the inaugural Directors’ Guild of Canada Discovery Award. More recently, Before the Streets was named best film at the Whistler Film Festival and was nominated in the best film category at the upcoming Canadian Screen Awards (as is Dolan’s).
Kiss Me Like a Lover, which opened last year’s Festival des films du monde, is a bouillabaisse of delightful craziness that stars almost everyone in Quebec that
you have heard of, except Martin Matte and Robert Charlebois (I solemnly promise to never go back to that well again).
If W.C. Fields and Rex Murphy had a child, he might look a bit like André Forcier. The bearer of a bulbous nose and a brusque demeanour, he made his first film, La Mort vue par, in 1966 and since has made 15 other feature films.
Among his better known titles are Bar Salon, L’Eau chaude, l’eau frette and Une histoire inventée.
In his W.C Fields heart, Forcier is a comic filmmaker. But somehow he just doesn’t find the world a funny place, or if he does, he doesn’t think that discovery is much fun.
It’s a lovely title, Kiss Me Like a Lover, and ominous, as this is precisely what the disabled young heroine wants, alas, from her older brother.
Incest alert. The brother is devoted, but it’s 1940, and there is a war. He is already staying home to take care of her and of their mother, the exquisite Céline Bonnier.
To shake his sister’s advances, he casts his eyes on his best pal’s gal after he ships off to the front.
Alas, Sis haunts him still, and in his dreams she becomes a vampire.
I bet you’re wondering when all this gets funny. Well, it does in its own grumpy old way.
“I am free of all prejudice,” W.C. Fields said. “I hate everyone equally.” Forcier and Fields would have a lot to talk about.